THE WAR ON WORK

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Edition

I talk to people on planes. Less on trains because it is easier to read and work on trains but I often talk to the random person next to me on planes to get a different perspective on the state of the nation. I know some people (particularly from large cities will find that disconcerting from my days on Bay Street where speaking to co-workers on elevators or on the street often startled them) but I was raised in the country, taught to be friendly, and talking to strangers is a way of hacking my personal media and social circle algorithm.

And so, a few weeks ago I was flying by a rather circuitous route to a town fairly north where the government had announced billions in spending. Almost everyone was overjoyed with the announcement as billions would soon be flowing into the local economy, elbows would be up, Canada was back etc… Everyone that is except those who actually work building major projects or even minor projects in Canada. Beside me on the plane was a government official, unnamed for obvious reasons. After the usual opening chit chat and introductions, I said that the greatest challenge was lack of trades and construction companies. The response was blunt: “oh no way we can spend all that money, there aren’t enough workers to do the projects Canada has already, let alone fly them up here.” I have some sympathy for bureaucrats depending on the circumstances, and it was clear this poor person was being asked to deliver the undeliverable because the comms plan had dictated the announcement without an operational plan to actually do it. That does not mean it shouldn’t be done, it is in fact long overdue, but the fact is the war on work in Canada has depleted our work force to such an extent than many of these project announcements will remain just announcements for a long time. And that friends, is a big problem.

The next day at lunch, I was with a leading businessperson from that town. The biggest concern was the lack of Temporary Foreign Workers and Immigrants. The person conceded that “Toronto obviously has an immigration problem,” but that is not our problem. “Without Filipinos there would be no one to work at Tim Hortons, run the gas stations, and drive trucks.” An aging population, the flight of young people to southern urban centers, and a culture of dependency on social assistance and fentanyl for some, had left the area without a domestic work force to deal with the existing economy let alone the billions promised.

Sometime after that, I was on yet another circuitous route and on the leg from Halifax, my seat mate was a strapping young man in his thirties, bearing the usual indicia of being a FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) worker. I said “Fort Mac?” and he responded “Not this time. Kitimat. Expanding the LNG terminal.” I asked what he did and he is a heavy machinery operator. I said that was a long way to fly someone to run an excavator. He said yes, but the job was almost done. He would have a week off then was being sent to someplace in Northern Saskatchewan to work at a mine. I tip my hat to this guy, a husband and father to a young family in Nova Scotia, who spends his days traversing the country to build it and provide a life for his family. He, and those like him need to be admired and thanked and the people who complain about the FIFO people filling up the Air Canada lounge in Toronto should consider just how it is that the guys in sneakers and ball caps accumulate so many Aeroplan points and status. My cousin did it into his sixties and it takes a toll on the body and it left his wife alone to deal with everything at home for weeks on end, while holding down her own job. One month it included shooting a black bear off the back deck. Like military deployments, working away from home has benefits but also costs, missed births, and missed school concerts. But the fact of the matter is that flying a hoe operator across the country to build a retaining wall exposes a national emergency in the deficiency of trades and those prepared to work.

Now to automobiles. I recently had to drive across middle Ontario to a wedding. Every Tim Hortons was understaffed with help wanted signs in the window. One family restaurant was filled with customers but only had one venerable server and one helper struggling to deliver bacon and eggs in less than an hour. The hotel upon arrival did not have sufficient cleaners so rooms were not ready until after 5 pm. Along the way, lumber yards and gravel pits had help wanted signs and if I was a young man or woman, I would be getting my AZ (heavy commercial) driver’s licence because if help wants signs are any indication, they are in more demand than a Leaf draft pick who can score. In contrast, the golf courses however were full of the young and old alike…

Aside from my travel anecdotes, do any sort of reading on the economy and you will see that it isn’t just construction, agriculture (average age of farmers is now north of 56) or the service industries that are short of workers. Computer engineers, naval engineers, ship captains, law clerks, and aerospace engineers are in as short supply as plumbers, pipefitters, and RCMP officers. Money is not the main problem; the lack of workers is.

All of this begs the question of how did we get to this worker shortage when our population had grown enormously over my lifetime until recent cuts to immigration and outflows to the United States and other nations increased? Why are there not workers in abundance to meet present and future demand? How can we have unemployment but still jobs left open? How is it at all economical to fly a hoe operator from Nova Scotia to British Columbia? Perhaps the economics do not matter in that case given the law of supply and demand because the LNG plant was not going to get built without flying in someone from Nova Scotia so the cost is whatever the inflationary cost is. But… how many other projects do not happen because the economic math doesn’t add up? What happens to these necessary nation building projects if there are no Canadians to build them? Where did the workers go and what are we going to do about it?

The problem is not the number of people but rather the number of people who can, and will, work in the industries that we need. It is also important where those people are located. Unemployed and unskilled bodies in areas without work does not help and people who will not work does not help. Overflowing Toronto does not help. Most importantly, and it needs to be said, the fact that many in Canada condemn what Weber called the “Protestant Work Ethic” does not help. If Canada is to have an industrial strategy (and it needs one), it also needs a work force strategy, and that strategy must return work to its status as a moral value rather than continue the war on work.

This is so because the cost to Canada’s future from the war on work is even greater than the immediate cost of flights and ATCO man camps. The societal cost is that Canada and its institutions have waged a not so silent war on hard work for the last half century and in the process degenerated our moral fibre as the historian Niall Ferguson would put it. A once great agricultural and industrial nation, where lives were carved out of the wilderness by the fur trade, farms, forests, fishing fleets and factories, cast all of that away and began off shoring our manufacturing, sending our environmental waste to the far east, demonizing the dirty jobs in the trades and service industries, and removing shop class from high schools. Helicopter parents began infantilizing our children as free play and bruised knees became impermissible and hockey became a half ice exercise, leading to our lack of success in international tournaments. Courts and schools condemned settlement when without settlement there would not have been a Canada at all – without confederation and the CPR – Canada would long ago have become the 51st state. Governments, NGOs, and the courts began tying up projects in decades of regulatory approvals, litigation, and consultations, such that many companies exited Canada altogether.

All the while, successive governments were buying votes by expanding the social safety net into a social welfare floor, subsidizing social programs and the lifestyles for those who would not pick up a wrench, bag groceries, pick fruit or move to where there was work. It became impolite, then impermissible, to name and shame the malingers and the lazy. Worth was not an objective measure but rather a personal identification. Children were taught to follow their dreams no matter how unrealistic those dreams were, rather than to do the hard work of building a life, career, and family. Stoic masculinity and responsibility became twisted into toxic masculinity and rights. Basements filled with twenty-five-year-old influencers, gamers, and critical theorists as a result.

The opposition to work and grit has become so pervasive that when an industry led group started a movement called “Build Canada” to get Canada building and retain Canada’s entrepreneurs, they were routinely and blatantly pilloried by academics and social commentators as “tech bros” despite being founded and led by women. Moreover, the fact that some of the nation’s most innovative and successful entrepreneurs supported the movement should be celebrated not condemned regardless of their gender. The problem is that the very idea that businesspeople would “lean in” to build a more productive nation is offensive to those wedded to government providing their daily bread and excusing their personal bad choices. This culture change from the Greatest Generation to the Me Generation to today’s Generation, who cannot afford a house, has deprived us of a work force but it has also deprived us of a work culture that provides a moral centre and self-worth that an honest day’s work once provided to the Canadian people.

These cohort references are obviously generalizations. I know some fantastic hard-working twenty-year-olds and some completely shiftless fifty-year-olds. Culture change has occurred over time and we cannot blame the young for the degeneration / slide that has been occurring since the 1960’s. The bottom line, however, is that if we have to fly a hoe operator from Nova Scotia to British Columbia because he is one of the few who will actually do the work, we have a big problem that needs solving. This is not to say that bankers, lawyers, and investors are not important – they are. But as my flight companion north pointed out, without trades to execute, raising capital and making financing announcements does not get the hospital, pipeline, or data centre built. In a world of Trump, AI, and wars in the Ukraine, the Middle East and quite possibly Taiwan, this is not sustainable. Work needs to become a value again – we can’t afford to let people sit this one out.

Again, this is not to say trades are everything and university is a waste. I have three degrees and am working on my fourth. But one of those degrees is a professional designation that led to a career and even that career is going to be tremendously affected by AI. The other degrees give me a better understanding of the society we inherited, the society we have, and a fear for the society we are leaving our children. But at the same time, I worked three jobs in high school before enlisting in the army to get a paid education. I also pick up a wrench and a chainsaw weekly although I am far less skilled with those than the law or the economics of Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes and at 61, my retirement date is still thirty years away. Career paths can and should be varied but the problem is more than just plumber versus engineer. It’s the fact that work itself as a moral value has lost traction and we have privileged process and dependence over productive and self-sufficient work.

I am drawing a distinction between employment or income and actual work here. Having a job does not mean that you actually work, as in do something productive. The fact that the federal government requires a tweet to go through 14 levels of approvals demonstrates that there are many employed who are not turning out something of value (that is not hyperbole by the way – it’s a real thing). The private sector is not immune either; as I have written before, whole sectors of the private economy are parasitical participants in an economy slowed by process. In addition, the fact that “influencers” make livings, if not millions, by providing opinions on Taylor Swift or doing silly or dangerous things on YouTube doesn’t mean that is work or a societal good. And all of this difference between “work” and “income” is before Linda McCuaig or Zohran Mamdani promote asinine schemes of minimum incomes, taxes just for the rich, and free groceries so as to further harm self-reliance, self-worth, and self-respect within society. The Nordic countries tried it and ended it already.

Now these issues are far more complicated than a Substack allows. Are wages sufficient to draw Canadian workers or have business owners been taking advantage of foreign workers or students for example. And why is youth unemployment so high if so, many jobs are available? Did we solve our domestic refusal to work problem with out-of-control immigration? Why were shop classes pulled from high schools and critical theory allowed in universities? Why in my travels did I see so many people clearly incapable of working because they are morbidly obese? How has the lack of work primarily affected our young men, who many researchers say are in crisis? All of these issues need to be considered but the bottom line is that we need people to design drones, build houses, manufacture submarines, mine critical minerals, police our streets, and yes, serve coffee.

Two weeks ago, it was reported that 42% of Canadian manufacturers are considering moving to the US and many of those have halted all capital investment in the meantime. Trump and tariffs are largely the reason but so is the cost of doing business in Canada. It’s not just regulations either. The lack of people who will work is real and inflationary. Robotics and AI will help but many jobs still require a calloused hand and someone who will get up at 4. Or lawyers who answer their email on weekends. We cannot build a nation in a time of chaos on the basis of free-riders living off the avails of others, especially with an aging population. If Canada wants to chart its own middle way, then more Canadians need to work for it.

There are many things to be done to remedy this mess, from returning shop to high schools, to providing broadband to remote communities so that they too have the opportunity to build in the knowledge economy. But let me leave you with just one incentive fix idea. Retired trades people and those in other critical jobs such as the military or medicine, who come out of retirement to teach or to work again should be paid tax free with no claw back from private pensions, CPP or OAS. The system that exists now provides an incentive to retire rather than help retool the nation. Canada needs to build and for Canada to build, Canadians need to work, and those that are working need to keep working, and Canada needs to stop taxing work and ambition.